Author
Topic: Signs that you weren't meant to be... (Read 2697 times)

After reading a bunch of posts on the dating board I ended up thinking about my first boyfriend. Looking back there were some signs that maybe he wasn't quite the knight in shining armor I thought he was.

He would download 4 or 5 songs onto his laptop and then play them on a loop non-stop. This would go on for days. We didn't have the same taste in music, so eventually I would end the musical torture by threatening to break his laptop. I should have run for the hills when I found out that he liked bagpipe music.

He was also a notoriously bad cook. He once put a bag of popcorn in the microwave for 30 minutes and went on his computer. Eventually the bag turned black and began smoking, which set off the smoke detector. He had to run the bag outside into the the parking lot!

My high school boyfriend stood me up on Valentine's Day because his mother wanted him to stay in and watch a movie with her. Not even a phone call, either--I had to call him to find out what was going on.

In honesty, there were a ton of similar signs prior to this. I just remember it as the moment I finally started to think, "Now wait just a darn minute...."

With my best boyfriend to date: the sign that we weren't meant to be was that when we weren't actually doing things together, we didn't have anything to talk about. We could talk about shared experiences, but when we weren't having them, conversation kind of petered off. Oddly enough, although now he's not the type I'm physically attracted to (for some reason, after swinging all over the map for many years, my tastes have narrowed to guys with a fairly specific height, face shape, and coloration), we have a lot more to talk about and are good friends.

With the worst one:I was blind to the red flags and air raid sirens going off. I made some of them into permanent rules. Don't date a guy still living with his parents and being entirely supported by them after he's old enough to have graduated college. Don't date a guy who thinks it's funny to scare animals (although admittedly, what he was doing to scare the animal was itself funny, and many animals wouldn't have been scared by it...but he thought the scaring was funny. And that's not okay.)

With the longest one:Don't date a guy with an addictive personality. It doesn't matter if he quits doing one thing, because he will find something else to replace it, and there are very few things that you can do in excess without negative consequences.For that matter, don't date a guy with a habit you really can't stand, whether that's smoking or stacking napkins with his plates when he puts them in the sink (which, incidentally, caused the pipes to clog with dissolved paper and the sink to back up. I know it was dissolved paper because I had to dissemble the pipes to clear the clog!)

Also, if your parents' relationship is severely dysfunctional, don't date a guy who has anything in common personality-wise with your dad, because, most likely, you're at least enough like your mother that you'll repeat their relationship dynamics.

I was with my ex for 7 1/2 years; engaged for about 2 months before I realized that the red flags that I had been able to ignore in a "temporary" relationship were deal-breakers when looking at the rest of my life.

The big one I should have clued in on the first time I went to visit him: He was a 40-something year old man living with his mother. He slept in the living room because his teenage son had his mom's second bedroom. He would end up moving directly from his mother's house to mine, where he ate my food, ran up my electric and water bills, and occasionally grudgingly did some renovations. Who would have seen that coming?

Another big clue should have been his lack of regard for me. After we had been together for about a year, he went on a trip that would have him gone about 2 weeks. The only time and reason "I" heard from him was when he called his mom to tell her he'd been in a car accident, and I happened to be visiting her when the call came in. There was also an occasion that I called his mother's house to speak to him, and she was surprised to hear that I hadn't known he had left town for the weekend...

Well, towards the end of our relationship, he unilaterally decided he was moving to [city 9 hours away] part-time. Part-time turned to most-of-the-time, and at one point after being gone for a couple weeks he was passing through our town on his way to an event, and came "home" less than a full night (got in late in the evening and was gone when I woke up). Of course, during his times away he rarely if ever made the effort to contact me. I drove to his new town once, and when I called towards the end of the drive because I was tired and needed some conversation to keep me awake, he couldn't talk because he was "watching a video". (He was fairly technologically inept, maybe he didn't realize the VCR has a pause button. ) Apparently, if they can't be bothered to communicate with you in the early days, it doesn't get better over time.

I have two stories, one really sad, and one really stupid. I'll post Stupid later.

The saddest story I have:

I really, really liked a boy I knew in middle and high school. Let's call him "Scott." Scott was (seemingly) a sweetheart to me. He was cute and polite, and I really thought he was a good guy.

Well. He had a girlfriend for a couple years who was not very bright and not very kind, but foolish me thought he was just holding out for someone like me. He also had friends who tormented me in school, but I told myself that that was his friends, not him. So, after he broke up with her, I started flirting with him and he would flirt back.

One day, my sister's best friend took me aside and said, "Violinp, Scott doesn't like you. He's only flirting with you as a joke. I heard him talking about it with his friends." It both made no sense and complete sense at the same time. He'd never really been interested in me until a few months ago, and his friends could have put him up to it for a laugh.

I refused to ever speak to him again, even when he tried to chase me down, and I never spoke about him again in school except for one time when one of his friends tried to talk to me about it. I was not an Ehellion at the time, nor did I behave like one to this guy :

Friend: Were you the one who liked Scott? (He couldn't remember if it was me or my sister? Really?)Me: I did, and I don't want to talk about him.Friend: Why not?Me: Because he's a (redacted)!Friend: How?Me: Ask him! *storms off*

I found out from my sister, after we graduated, that Scott really did like me. She said she'd seen him looking at me leave in a way a guy only does when he likes a girl, and it wasn't in places where he would need to impress people. I was heartbroken, knowing I'd probably never see him again, and all I'd done for two years was essentially giving him the cut direct without even telling him why, when he'd done nothing wrong.

Now that I look on the situation, though, I can see it better. He was popular, and wanted to keep being popular, so he acted like I didn't mean much to him so he could look good to his friends. While I can understand that, I don't have much sympathy for that. If his popularity meant more to him than the girl he liked, then we never really could have made it work in high school - he was too worried about what people thought about him and I was too unworried about what people thought of me. Also, the fact that he was friends with people who made my school life hell really should've been my dealbreaker - if he thought keeping the friendship of that kind of person was important, then what in hell was I doing trying to be his girlfriend?

Logged

"It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends" - Harry Potter

My first boyfriend was when I was 14 and a sophomore in high school. Boyfriend was my age but was a freshman. That in itself wasn't a deal breaker; what was a deal breaker was that Boyfriend and I were poles apart intellectually, to the point where I felt as thought I was talking over his head if I said, "Nice weather we're having." He was a nice guy, but when I talked to him I had to limit myself to words of fewer than three syllables. About the only thing we had in common was that we both liked animals, and in fact we met when my mom called the local SPCA asking for someone to petsit for us and he was referred. But that was it.

I was friends with a guy senior year of high school. I had a crush on him, but he was also the rare crush that I could actually chat with and not be too shy to speak.

Around prom season, I really wanted him to ask me but I heard from his friends that he wasn't into dances. So I knew he wasn't going to ask me, and I didn't want to ask him if he didn't really want to go. (I went with another guy friend who asked and had fun.)

When we signed each other's yearbooks, I saw that he had written his phone number and encouraged me to call him sometime that summer. I planned to do so after Beach Week (the week immediately after graduation where people head to the beach and party it up).

Two days later at the beach, I met a new guy and dated him all that summer.

I kept in distant touch with crush guy through college (I moved across the country for college, he stayed local), and reconnected around our 10 yr high school reunion. We hung out a few times when I came back to town to visit my family, not actual dates though. Then he gave me a very nice, very expensive Xmas gift out of nowhere (we never exchanged gifts before, and I had nothing for him). A little later, we lost touch again for almost a year, and then I got a long, hand-written love letter from him, which was the first and only solid indication I had from him that he had feelings for me outside of friendship (he never indicated the gift was a romantic overture). Right before I met the man I married.

So, we had flirting, exchange of phone number, date-like invitations, thoughtful gift, and love letter. All of those things would have been great had they happened within the span of a few months during senior year of high school, not played out over 15 years!

First bf in high school when I was 14 (freshman) and he was 15 (sophomore), was extremely jealous and manipulative. We dated for 7 months. One of the times he was jealous was because a girl that I had an extra curricular activity with had a crush on me even though I didn't like girls.

I had tried to break it off at 4 months because I had developed a crush on someone else (that I probably had no chance with but was trying to do the honest thing) but he cried and begged me not to. It was only downhill and rocky from there. Unfortunately, when we broke up he had already infiltrated my group of friends and even acquaintances over the course of the 7 months we were together, so therefore I was the bad guy to everyone when we broke up.

He also proceeded to date pretty much all of my friends and acquaintances. There were only 2 friends and 1 acquaintance that were on my side. I'm still friends with those 2 friends today, 1 of them has become more of an acquaintance and the other is a good friend but we don't see each other often. Anyways, I felt that I had ignored them a great deal when I was with this bf yet they welcomed me back with open arms and we spent the rest of our high school years together. I vowed to never put boys before friends ever again.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2nd bf in high school was when I was a junior and he was a senior. I had crushed on this guy for 2 years. We were friends and in an extra curricular activity together. We had different friends/groups though. We started talking more online and on the phone and he finally said he was interested in being more than friends with me. He had known I had liked him pretty much the entire 2 years. Anyways, his condition was that us being together had to remain a secret. I think deep down I knew that was a red flag but I had crushed on him for so long so I said ok. He dumped me after a month and a half. I didn't talk to him for a year. Then some how I think he found me online and started chatting again and our conversation moved to the phone where I decided to get closure for myself and demanded to know why us being together had been kept secret. His answer "I don't know..." I've run into him on and off through the years. The last time was I think over 5 years ago though. He asked if I had a "man" to which I happily replied yes Too little too late...--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And finally my first adult bf out of high school. I was 19 and he was 29. I think because of our age difference that he treated me like a child. He was always sarcastic and condesending. He also lived at home and it was obvious he was very much a mama's boy. I dumped him after a year and a half.

You would've sworn we had been married though! I was an authorized user (definitely NOT a joint owner) on his bank account and apparently this was not removed after our break up. Throughout the years I've received collection calls from the bank for him and they called me as a contact since I was listed as an authorized user. I kept telling them to take me off and stop contacting me til I was blue in the face!

His number hadn't changed over the years and I had sent him texts now and then when they would contact me letting him know. Obviously he could've cared less. He would usually just say "Ok thanks." One collection agent I spoke with even had the audacity, after I told her we hadn't dated in 8 years, if I could still please pass on the message to him. As if that's my job! I finally found a form on the bank's website that I was able to fill out and fax to get myself removed.

Okay, this is my stupid story, which is considerably shorter than Sad.

I liked another guy in high school that I'll call Dan. I thought he really liked me, because he flirted with me. Somehow I missed the fact that he flirted with every single girl in our mutual acquaintance - even his girlfriend's younger sister!

I probably should've given up after he told his girlfriend how long she should have her fingernails, as well.

Logged

"It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends" - Harry Potter

My ex-fiancee became a Catholic priest. I joke that the major sign should have been that he changed all my tv channel favorites from HGTV and Food Network (and the like) to religious channels. And he got me a copy of the Baltimore Catechism for our dating anniversary. And he thought the perfect place to propose was a shrine.